The letters of most of the major figures of the time are publicly available, as are the newspapers of the era via Google Books and other free, online resources.

The letters of most of the major figures of the time are publicly available, as are the newspapers of the era via Google Books and other free, online resources. I highly recommend reading as much as you can. That's a lot of reading, so if you want a shortcut, I'd recommend the book "American Aurora." It is essentially a selection of newspaper articles, Federalist and Democratic-Republican both, and letters, concatenated to form a narrative. You should, however, keep in mind that it is intentionally slanted towards the Democratic-Republicans. > I feel like Washington is extremely venerated, which makes me a bit suspicious. It's not quite a cult of personality like Stalin but nobody's perfect. The cult of personality around Washington was quite deliberately engineered and some of his contemporaries - some even nominally his friends - privately lamented that someone (in their eyes) so awful would be, for all ages, venerated as a great man and a hero, but they regarded it as necessary that the nasty infancy of the country would be glossed into something more noble. (I do think his contemporaries judged him too harshly, but things always look different centuries later.)